‘It’s not a gift, but restitution, not charity but justice,’ she wrote. It was the duty of adults, she insisted, to care for them in such a way that they would once again belong to the human family. ‘We will restore their hope because they are our only hope in a world in which we have failed.’
Odette Fabius, elegantly slim before she was captured, returned skeletally thin. She had been sent from Ravensbrück to Malm? with Toquette Jackson, equally sick and thin, until both were well enough to walk. Odette recovered although needed the help of her sticks for several months. Excited as she was to see Marie-Claude again, she was also shocked to discover that the svelte little girl she had abandoned in 1943, two years later ‘had blown up … of course still pretty but twice the size since everyone around her had tried to spoil her with food to help her forget the absence of her mother’. Not many women were consulting doctors at this moment, worried about overweight children but, extraordinarily, Odette took her daughter for a consultation with the famous Paris paediatrician Robert Debré, a decision which goes some way towards explaining the iron will of a woman who could survive Ravensbrück. Odette also went to the synagogue in the Rue de la Victoire to attend a memorial service for her murdered aunt and uncle, Raymond and Antoinette Berr, parents of Hélène, the gifted young French woman deported first to Auschwitz then to Bergen-Belsen, where she died in 1945. Odette was appalled to discover there a poisonous atmosphere among those who had survived; some were whispering about who had survived thanks to calling in certain privileges, while others gossiped about who had benefited from the Occupation and how. In this mood, Parisians were not ready to commemorate Hélène Berr’s short life, but at least Andrée Bardiau, the family housekeeper who had been with the Berrs for fifty years and had carefully looked after Hélène’s diary as it was handed to her page by page for safekeeping, now, on 20 June 1946, passed the manuscript to Hélène’s brother, who typed up a copy for the family and gave the original to her fiancé, Jean Morawiecki. Consumed by guilt for abandoning her, he put the diary quietly to one side.
Odette and Robert returned to living together for the sake of their daughter, but now with what she described as an affectionate ‘modus vivendi’, or total liberty for each of them to pursue their own friendships. As soon as she could, Odette went to Marseilles to visit Pierre Ferri-Pisani. Having thought of him constantly during her time at Ravensbrück, she had tried to prepare herself for their reunion, but even so his dramatic decline and frailty were unimaginable. He had lost forty-four pounds, was partially deaf having stepped on a mine, and was uncertain of himself, having not spoken aloud for a year. At the sight of Odette, he opened his arms for her and then fainted. ‘He was emptied of life and energy. He could not understand how I could say that, having lived through an abominable experience, I was trying to find positive aspects of the experience such as the force of friendship.’
The relationship continued for a few more months as Ferri-Pisani travelled to Paris, ostensibly to meet political comrades while he was fighting elections, but also to see Odette and rekindle their wartime romance. He hoped to find a more permanent job that would allow him to come regularly, but then his wife, having only now discovered the relationship, attempted suicide. Odette believed that, without the links that bound them in fighting a common enemy, their relationship was doomed. Ferri-Pisani’s post-war style of life was not what she had remembered in 1943. ‘Paradoxically our liberation just produced obstacles … I realised I was not capable of breaking with all my past life which, now that the war was over, had reawakened in me.’ In addition, she had money worries as her husband’s business had all but collapsed and family finances were precarious. She decided she had to end the affair with Pierre and in mid-1946, a year after her return from the camps, Odette Fabius accepted a job working for the United Nations in New York. She never saw Pierre again, ‘the most brilliant man that I was ever to meet’.